Guest Blogger, Laura McNamara

Ladies and Blogeurs, please join me in welcoming our next guest here on Savage Minds, Laura McNamara. Laura is an organizational anthropologist (PhD. 2001, U of New Mexico) who currently works at Sandia Labs, a government lab run by Lockheed Martin. She works on problems of knowledge management and generation in complex organizations, such as issues of modeling and simulation, verification and validation, uncertainty quantification, and decision making. She has worked with the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons programs at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to identify both the limitations of, and leverage points for, the effective use of modeling and simulation technologies in interdisciplinary research and development projects. I like several things about Laura’s work: she is obviously keen on unusual and provocative collaborations, working with physicists and computer scientists as well as other social scientists; she has a very down to earth (dare I say, ethnographic?) approach to the problems facing governments and their knowledge workers in the post Cold War period, which despite all the rampant theorization of empire and globalization in anthropology, remains strikingly hard to find. Add to that she keeps llamas, lives on a ranch, and will be regaling us with extensive thick description of government documents related to interrogation and torture in the Global War on Terrorism. Please put your caps lock on for Laura McNamara…

Christopher Kelty does anthropological and historical research on science and technology, free and open source software, intellectual property and open access, the history of software, and the ethics and politics of nanotechnology. He also teaches classes about all of these things. From 2001 to 2008 he was assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University, in Houston, TX. He know teaches at UCLA and splits his time between the Information Studies department, the Anthropology Department and the Center for Society and Genetics.